Teachers are hired to teach, which, for the most part, they do. How they teach is as varied as the number of teachers on the planet. No one does the same thing, although similar methods and approaches abound.

What’s more important in the classroom, teachers, teaching methods, technology, class make up? It is not an altogether easy answer, especially now.

Years ago, children communicated with each other by being in the actual presence of others. Sending letters, using the telephone, or passing hand written notes was the highest technology available.

Teachers in classrooms generally lectured about a subject. Depending on the subject, the hands on component consisted of reading, writing, building a model, or, in the case of science, experiments. It’s what was available and it’s what happened, day in and day out, in classrooms across the globe. Mostly, it worked pretty well.

Starting with children who were born about 30 years ago, there was an ever faster change in the way children communicated. The pace of the change simply accelerated over time.

By the time children who were born in 1979 hit high school, and then college, they were keeping in touch with a multitude of modalities. The entire social media experience was on us, and is on us, and continues to change at an extraordinary rate.

The interconnectedness of young people now days is more intense than it has ever been. To some extent, teaching methods have attempted to keep up with all of this. Close, but maybe not close enough.

In a recent study published in Science, the use of a more hands on approach, rather than the traditional large lecture hall experience, appears to have resulted in better test results.

The study by a team at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, in Canada, led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman, used a more interactive, real time feed back method in a physics class of 250 students at the university level. Another 250 students were taught using the lecture method.

The interactive method posted much better test results. The interactive class was taught by two grad students, the lecture class by a well respected Professor.

Oddly enough, Kindergarten uses the interactive, instant feedback method more than anything else. Of course, the biggest difference between Kindergartners and University students is that the University students weigh more and have been around longer. The brain, it seems, learns best by doing.

It seems, according to this rather limited study, that the person teaching may not be quite as important as the method and tools employed by the teacher. This is not to suggest that the teacher hasn’t much to do with the process. Everyone has had teachers who simply inspire those in the classroom, and teachers who are best described as rather flat and uninspiring.

Give the results of this study, perhaps the teaching profession would do well to support the mass inclusion of available technology to match what children, from Kindergarten to college, are already using.

The basic skills still need to be mastered. It’s how they are mastered that may be a tipping point between average and spectacular.